


Hollywood A.D.

by scullywolf



Series: TXF: Scenes in Between [162]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alcohol, Banter, F/M, FTF Hallway Kiss, Gen, Missing Scene, Mulder's stupid brain disease thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-19
Updated: 2017-04-19
Packaged: 2018-10-20 19:31:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10669329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scullywolf/pseuds/scullywolf
Summary: That "No ifs, ands, or bees" line inThe Lazarus Bowlmeans that someone had to have told the story of the near-kiss to someone on the film crew.





	Hollywood A.D.

_“That’s it, Scully. I can’t take it anymore!”_  
_“Shh, Mulder, sit down.”_

He can’t get out of the theater fast enough. No ifs, ands, or bees. No ifs… ands… or _bees_.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he mutters, shoving open the door and stalking out into the warm Los Angeles night.

The Fox lot is not deserted, but the crowds from earlier have dispersed, and the relative quiet is a sudden contrast to the audience’s laughter still ringing in his ears. Strangely enough, it’s not an entirely welcome contrast, as he realizes it just makes him feel all the more exposed, standing out here alone in front of the theater, still holding his stupid plastic Lazarus bowl full of popcorn. He casts around for a moment, wondering where he can go, when he remembers that the sound stage one building over has been dressed up as the graveyard from the movie as a sort of promotional deal for the premiere -- get your picture in front of the green screen looking like you’re running away from zombies, that sort of thing. The door is still propped open, and when he pokes his head inside, he doesn’t see anybody in there.

Perfect.

He finds a place to sit and try to breathe through his embarrassment and anger. He’s just as angry with himself as he is with Shandling.

_Shandling_.

When he and Scully came out here to watch them shoot the movie, almost a year and a half ago, Garry Shandling had called him up the night before they left, caught him just as he was getting out of the bath.

“Let me meet you for a drink. I’ve got a few more questions for you, if you don’t mind.”

Even as he’d tried to play it cool, to affect disinterest in the glitz and sparkle of the Hollywood set, he secretly couldn’t help feeling a little starstruck. Just a little. So even though he would never in a million years admit it to Scully, the idea that a famous actor (okay, a moderately well-known actor) wanted to hang out and get a drink with _him_ , Spooky Fox Mulder, black sheep of the FBI, was strangely appealing.

If only he’d just said no.

Instead, he agreed to meet Garry in the hotel bar downstairs. “I really appreciate you letting me pick your brain some more,” Shandling told him after they ordered a couple of whiskeys. “Meeting you and Agent Scully today made me realize I need to… rethink some aspects of this character.” 

“What do you mean? I thought your character was… how did Federman put it? An ‘amalgamation loosely based on’ me?”

“Right, right, yeah. And he is. Technically. Like, on paper. But what Federman doesn’t understand is that truly _embodying_ a character requires so much more than mere words on a page.”

“You mean like with the…” Mulder made a gesture meant to evoke their earlier discussion of whether he dressed to the right or the left, but Garry’s widened eyes made it clear he either didn’t remember or didn’t understand. Mulder sighed. “What you said to me before, about finding your character’s… rudder?”

“Right! Yes, exactly. Exactly like that, yes.”

“Look, Mr. Shandling--”

“Please! Call me Garry.”

“Garry. I’m certainly not gonna tell you how to do your job, but this isn’t a documentary, right? I mean, based on what we saw today, it would be generous to even say the movie’s ‘loosely based’ on the truth. So how much does it really matter whether _your_ Fox Mulder does things exactly the same way I would?”

Shandling leaned in. “Listen, Fox-- Do you mind if I call you Fox?”

“I, uh, I prefer ‘Mulder,’ actually.”

Garry’s eyes narrowed, and he nodded slowly. “Interesting, very interesting. And how strong a preference would you say that was, on a scale of one to ten?”

Mulder chuckled. “Let’s just say the list of people who can get away with calling me ‘Fox’ doesn’t extend much beyond my mother.” 

Garry sat up straight again, looking slightly alarmed. “We’ll go with a ten on that, then. Good to know. See, this is really helpful stuff.” He pulled a small notepad and pen out of his pocket, then scribbled a few notes before continuing. “To answer your question about how much all of this matters? It matters immensely.”

Mulder waited for him to elaborate, but Shandling just sat there looking intently at him until he finally shrugged, picked up his drink, and took a long swallow. “All right then, I guess. Fire away. What do you wanna know?”

One drink turned into two. And then three. And eventually four. Mulder found himself answering the most eclectic mix of questions, from really mundane things like how he took his coffee and what brand of toothpaste he used, to downright philosophical questions like whether he thought it was possible to have happiness without sadness or whether truth was more important than love.

(He struggled with that one more than he expected.)

“Okay, I think I’ve got everything I need on you, specifically. _Now_ I need to dive into your relationship with your partner.”

Mulder snorted. “Yeah, good luck with that one,” he said without thinking, then cleared his throat. “I mean… there’s not much to tell.”

“Oh, I don’t believe that for a second. The way you two interacted at the set today… we’re talking _layers_ of complexity. There may be nothing straightforward about it, but unpacking that history between the two of you may be the single most important part of informing my character and his interaction with Tea’s character.”

Mulder spared a moment to wonder why Tea Leoni wasn’t giving Scully the third degree right now too, if all of this really was that important. His eyes widened with the thought that maybe she _was_ , and he just didn’t know it.

“Okay, so you’ve worked together for, what, five years now?”

“Uh, almost six,” he answered absently, still imagining Scully and Tea Leoni drinking and chatting and giggling. What he wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall in _that_ scenario.

“Now, I don’t know what it’s like in the FBI, but in this industry, two attractive co-stars working together that long, neither one married, or gay, you either end up hating each other or you end up sleeping together. Sometimes both.”

Mulder’s focus snapped back to the conversation at hand. “You’re kidding. You mean that’s not just a Hollywood stereotype?”

“Hey, it’s a classic for a reason. But you two… you certainly don’t seem to hate each other, and you’ve got an easy familiarity, but I don’t get the sense you’re doing the naked tango in your off hours. Am I right?”

“Yeah, no, we’re… Scully and I… we’re partners, and I trust her with my life, and she’s probably the best friend I’ve ever--” He stopped. That was _way_ more of an admission than he was comfortable with, even considering all the other ridiculous things he’d admitted to Garry over the course of their conversation. He cleared his throat again. “We’re friends. No tangoing, clothed or otherwise.”

“But you’ve at least kissed a couple times, right?”

Mulder’s face, already warm from the alcohol, flushed in an instant. He hoped it wouldn’t be apparent in the bar’s low lighting. “What?! No. I told you, we’re--”

“Aw, c’mon, don’t hold out on me, man. No two people who are ‘just friends’ look at each other the way you and Agent Scully do when you think the other one’s not paying attention. There’s more to the story, and I’ve got to know what it is.”

“We really haven’t, though. I mean, there was just the one… okay, one time I walked in on her about to kiss a guy she thought was me.” Garry’s eyebrows shot up, and Mulder shook his head. “Don’t ask. I can’t even _begin_ to explain that one. And then another time, I thought we were maybe going to, but then she got stung by a bee and almost died. Seriously though, that’s it.”

“Walk me through that second time, with the bee. Set the scene for me.”

Mulder groaned, rubbing a hand over his face. Up until then, he’d never spoken about that incident with anyone. He and Scully seemed to have come to a silent agreement to pretend it had never happened. He wasn’t exactly eager to re-live it, and yet… 

“She was gonna leave.” His voice was quiet, almost like the words were sneaking out without his permission. He dropped his hand, fiddling with the napkin on the bar in front of him, staring down at it while the memory unfolded in his mind. “We’d… _I’d_ gotten us in trouble again, and they slapped her with reassignment. So she came by my apartment to tell me she was quitting.”

He swallowed, remembering the panic he’d felt at the thought of losing her. The shock and dismay that even after all that time, she still thought she was holding him back.

“She, um, she started to go, and I followed her into the hallway.”

“And it was your Lloyd Dobler moment?” Shandling interrupted, and Mulder frowned. “You know. _Say Anything_? Peter Gabriel? ‘I gave her my heart and she gave me a pen?’”

“I don’t--” Mulder stammered, thrown out of whatever rhythm he’d started to find in the telling. He shook his head. “I told her I didn’t want to do the work without her. And we had… I don’t know, I guess you could call it a charged moment.”

“Locked gaze, passion crackling in the air, now or never, will they, won’t they?”

Mulder looked down, feeling foolish and starting to deeply regret his decision to share this. “Shut up, Shandling,” he muttered. 

“No, no, it’s beautiful! Real life is rarely so cinematic. You’ve got to appreciate it when the stars align like that. The beauty before the tragedy, Oscar-worthy drama playing out in an ordinary apartment building hallway, unscripted.” He sighed almost dreamily. “So then what happened?”

“Then the bee stung her in the back of the neck, and she collapsed, and the moment passed. We were both a little more focused on trying to keep her alive.”

“And you never decided to revisit, give it another try?”

“No, it seems we’ve decided to pretend it never happened.” Mulder downed the last of his drink and rubbed his eyes again.

“Damn, cock-blocked by anaphylaxis. That is _rough_.” Garry shook his head, scribbling furiously on his notepad. “Really though, that explains so much.”

“Look, Garry, this is just for your, you know, research or whatever, right? This stays between us?”

“Oh, for sure. Definitely. This is all just background, helping me find my motivation and all that. Scout’s honor.”

_Scout’s honor._

Sitting in the fake graveyard in his tuxedo, Mulder sets his popcorn to the side, puts his arms on his knees and lets his head fall down to rest on them. He should have known better. And now, this moment between him and Scully, this deeply personal and meaningful moment in their history together, is a throwaway line in a crappy movie, and worse than _that_ , Scully’s going to know exactly where it came from. 

“I’m so stupid,” he groans, heaving a deep sigh and picking his head up.

It’s not just the line. It’s the whole damned movie. For all Shandling’s bullshit claims about authenticity and embodying a character and whatever else he’d said, those depictions on the screen were nothing more than caricatures. His life’s work, turned into a joke. And if, god forbid, he’s not able to get a handle on this brain thing, this stupid movie is going to be the closest thing he’ll have to a legacy.

He’s hard-pressed to think of anything more depressing than that, just now. 

And then, inexplicably, he just starts laughing. It comes out of nowhere, but once he gets going he finds it hard to stop. It’s just so ridiculous, isn’t it? All of it: the sniper zombies of the Cigarette-Smoking Pontiff, the stupid, plastic Lazarus popcorn bowls, even the very idea that he, Fox William Mulder, could have a legacy worth defending. He laughs until tears run down his cheeks, and then he wipes them away and pulls himself together and picks up his popcorn once more. Sighing, he stares into the middle distance and shakes his head. 

He doesn’t notice when the stage door opens again.

**Author's Note:**

> [settledownfrohike](http://archiveofourown.org/users/settledownfrohike) gets credit for inspiring this choice of scene. ;) Also credit to [Lady Manson](http://ladymanson.com/galleries/tv/TVWZ/thumbnails.php?album=164) for the screencaps.


End file.
